I’d like to move in a slightly different direction now and talk about Hybrid Cloud for the enterprise.  I recently attended the Cloud Connect conference in Chicago and I’d like to share some interesting insights from the conference, such as how enterprises think about the cloud today, and what’s on deck that will help drive their further use of cloud in the near future.

One of the keynote presenters at Cloud Connect was Scott Bils from Everest Group (his presentation can be found here).  He presented a survey of enterprise IT and service providers. One of the key insights from this research was that cost is not the primary driver for cloud adoption for enterprises (in fact, cost was No. 5!). Top line growth is more of the imperative driving usage. It’s the time-to-market value proposition that is key here, and how self-service and automation (key tenants of a cloud) can rapidly shrink deployment times for new applications and new revenue streams for the business. I found this to be a very interesting point because the cost benefit (part from the utility billing and part from economies of scale) is more commonly believed to be the primary adoption driver for the cloud.

However, cloud still has some significant barriers to adoption. Security concerns remain the leading blocker, but a close second is integration of cloud solutions. Here’s my second point: if integration is a blocker, that implies that the adoption of cloud is dependent on it working WITH existing infrastructure and applications; not as a REPLACEMENT for them. In other words, a Hybrid Cloud can help overcome this barrier.

To me, the primary value of a Hybrid Cloud is precisely its ability to integrate different platforms. A Hybrid Cloud could be traditional IT infrastructure, dedicated hosting, private clouds and/or public clouds, within a single site or connecting infrastructure around the globe. The degree to which a hybrid solution succeeds at integration defines its success in accelerating cloud utility for business.

This suggests a couple of conclusions: first, that public cloud is not sufficient as a standalone platform for all use cases. Second, that there must be integration at several points in a solution. Management from a single console is not enough, nor is single sign on. Virtual Machine (VM) portability and network integration don’t solve the entire problem either. Rather, the combination of integrated services define the degree of integration (and by extension, the effectiveness of the hybrid solution).

If a Hybrid Cloud can effectively bridge traditional and cloud based solutions, it will allow enterprises to begin using cloud in a meaningful way (for production workloads) much more rapidly than waiting to move an entire app 100 percent into public cloud. By allowing the flexibility and integration between platforms, applications can be deconstructed into their architectural components (data storage, presentation, distribution, etc.). Then, these components can be matched to where they will be most optimized – some fit cloud use better than others. This almost certainly is a quicker path to cloud than a wholesale rebuild of an app, allowing that time-to-market benefit to accrue and help enterprises really start to drive top line growth through the use of cloud.

So, which options are available now and how can an enterprise leverage them effectively? Certainly there are solutions that help create Hybrid Clouds. There are many products available today that can solve authentication integration, network integration, VM mobility and single-pane-of-glass management. In most cases, though, they are either proprietary or from different vendors, meaning the enterprise must do some of the heavy lifting to bring these together into a comprehensive integration stack and build a complete solution.

At Rackspace, we’ve created RackConnect specifically for integrating dedicated and cloud hosted solutions. It solves for integration of infrastructure management, network integration and centralized security management. We have already seen an impressive adoption by midsized and larger enterprise customers – we know that Hybrid Clouds help enterprises meet their business needs. But today, RackConnect is limited to solutions within a single, Rackspace data center. We aim to change that.

Extending the design tenants of multi-level integration used in RackConnect to allow Hybrid Clouds to reach beyond a single data center can unlock many more use cases; particularly for enterprises that often have substantial critical IT assets that need to be deeply integrated into cloud. Disaster recovery, data replication and geo-distributed applications are all possibilities when cloud can be tied effectively into existing infrastructure. We are working on technologies that will extend the cloud right into the enterprise data center, and we are very excited about how this will help transform enterprise IT into a true business partner. These technologies will potentially enable them to drive revenue faster through the effective use of Hybrid Clouds.

I’ll leave the details of some of these exciting developments for the near future, but I will say that we are starting at the bottom of the architecture – at the network in the cloud.

As a small business, you likely have precious little budget to devote to IT infrastructure (servers, network gear, etc.). In fact, you’ve probably realized that the cloud offers you a huge leg up in getting your application up and running without having to pay upfront for what you need to launch or grow your online presence. And if you’re growing, cloud also offers the benefit of not needing to know exactly how much capacity you’ll need as you grow – you can simply add more compute or storage resources as you need them, and you’ll only pay for what you use. That’s the value of cloud, and many of our cloud customers today are just like you – a growing small business!

I want to offer a perspective that may add flexibility to your online application, as you plan for growth. As Jonathan mentioned last week, by using RackConnect at Rackspace, you can connect dedicated hosting with cloud. One popular example of this is adding a dedicated firewall in front of your Cloud Servers. This gives you several benefits right out of the gate.

The firewall provides a single point of entry to your application from the Internet – all traffic will be filtered by the firewall. So your cloud servers can be protected by simply managing the firewall rules on this one device. Since it is a dedicated device, you aren’t sharing with other customers, and Rackspace will help you manage the firewall as well. As part of the RackConnect solution, you can also define some network policies for your environment that will be applied to every Cloud Server you have. Again, RackConnect is a single place to manage security that distributes and maintains this policy across all your Cloud Servers even as you spin up additional servers – no more managing IPTables or Windows firewall on each server individually.

There are also some other good reasons to start off with a firewall as a part of your cloud solution. The firewall can serve as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) endpoint, giving you secure remote access to manage your cloud servers, or provide a site-to-site VPN back to the test server in your office.

But perhaps the most important reason to consider including a dedicated firewall along with your initial cloud deployment is that you gain immediate flexibility as your environment grows. If you‘re using a database on the cloud, it may reach a point where resizing that database is no longer practical (e.g. you have resized your cloud server to the maximum size and you still need more RAM). By having the firewall already in place, you can build out a dedicated, physical server to host your database behind that same firewall, and migrate your database from a cloud to dedicated server. This gives you a much more seamless path to expand your capacity, while minimizing or eliminating any downtime for your application. For the minimal cost of a dedicated firewall, you have now given yourself the flexibility to expand while limiting your risk of an outage or complicated migration. Sure, databases can span beyond a single server in the cloud, but if you don’t know how to shard MySQL across servers, why try to teach yourself when you don’t have to? This option can be hugely valuable, particularly for a smaller company; especially since your growth may be hard to forecast and you probably have limited technical resources to undertake multiple redesigns and performance optimizations.

You might also want to add more security services to your configuration. DDoS mitigation or a web application firewall, for example, can be easily added to your RackConnect environment. Because you chose to deploy using a hybrid cloud, these are easy to add on when you need them. Similarly, if you need to expand into an e-commerce solution in the future this can be greatly simplified by starting with a hybrid deployment. Using a payment gateway is a good option here, but having a dedicated database may be another option to help you attain Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification for your hybrid cloud-based application.

Planning ahead for growth is critical for any business. For a small business, it can often mean the difference between success and failure. Being the victim of your own success is entirely avoidable with proper planning. Hybrid cloud architecture, leveraging RackConnect, can give you the flexibility you need to succeed as you grow. To find out more, reach out to Rackspace today!

Rackspace received a 2012 F5 Agility Award in the customer segment. F5 highlighted our use of its solutions in the RackConnect™ hybrid hosting platform. RackConnect allows customers to receive the performance and security of traditional hosting while enabling customers to leverage the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud when needed. RackConnect leverages F5 BIG-IP LTM (Local Traffic Manager) and iControl functionality, which helped Rackspace reduce the development time of RackConnect to three months.

RackConnect has become a true differentiator for Rackspace in the market. And thanks to F5’s platform and its flexibility, Rackspace has created a user experience that is unique and allows our customers to build new and innovative applications.

Thank you to F5 for recognizing the work we do with RackConnect. And congratulations to the other 2012 F5 Agility Award winners: MLB Network and Future Com Ltd.

Here is a video case study showcasing how Rackspace uses F5 Networks for RackConnect:

So where do we go from here? Well, one direction is to move out. Literally. Move out of the Rackspace Data Center, and across to other locations where our customers have existing IT infrastructure. What I mean is that while hybrid cloud within Rackspace has several advantages and benefits, many customers have existing IT deployments and would love to connect those with Rackspace hosting and cloud resources to create a hybrid cloud over distance.

Given that need, I’m excited to release this whitepaper (download the pdf here), which is the culmination of the first phase of a proof of concept we’ve conducted at Rackspace with industry leading partners including EMC, Brocade and Masergy. We have explored one potential use case for hybrid cloud over distance – the Metro Area Hybrid Cloud, a cloud environment that spans a metropolitan area. By no means is this the only use case, but there was an opportunity to explore some new territory here, and we seized it. The whitepaper dives deeper into the particulars of the Metro Area Hybrid Cloud, and I’ll also be discussing this effort in greater detail this week at EMC World in Las Vegas.

This is exciting stuff, but there is more to learn before we are ready to release a product in this space. If this use case, or a similar one, represents a potential solution to a problem you’d like to solve in the near term, we would love to hear from you. We have a brief survey to gather some information from you about your needs. From those survey respondents, we will form a Product Advisory Council to help us build the next generation of hybrid clouds at Rackspace. Please follow the link below if you’d like to provide us some feedback or would like to be included for consideration in this Advisory Council.

For more information, please e-mail us at HM.POC@rackspace.com.

Launching in 2006, Major League Gaming (MLG) brings the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat to millions of online gamers worldwide. By working with companies like Dr. Pepper, Kraft, and Nestle, MLG has been able to grow its user base to millions of gamers and users. MLG relies on its network of sites to deliver an optimal user experience for gamers and site visitors. The site draws huge crowds during the many new game launches and competitions they host throughout the year. They’ve built a reputation among gamers as the go-to place for game news, reviews, previews, and game-related media with a focus on online multi-player games and community based content.

Read the full Major League Gaming Case Study to learn more about how Rackspace has helped MLG to continue to grow their business.

Toby Owen is a Product Manager for RackConnect